1) threaded kernel is being worked on, we should be scaling nicely on SMP as a result some time in the near future

2) re-entrant kernel, in the cases where it even makes sense to do so we will get it for free via #1, if you want a pre-emptive kernel that is another story all together

Memory may be cheap, however on chip cache is not. This is one of thebiggest arguments against persistant resizable storage, and why realsystems continue to be monolithic and written in C/Assembler.

People who want a Linux kernel in Java VM, go ahead be my guest andimplement such a thing. However I will never encourage anyone to useit who happens to care about performance. I have enough troublegetting every last cycle out of the kernel using C and Assembler.(try to get 1200 web operations per second on a Java VM based kernel using current processors, not gonna happen)

Eventually perhaps systems will be fast enough that a Java VM writtenkernel would have even passable performance. It will be quite astatement of how we can waste CPU cycles, the VLSI guys areessentially wasting their time at such a point because the softwarepeople are in a state of delirium. If we have left it any timerecently, this would put us right back into the software crisisagain that everyone moans about.